26 Years Diary sounds like a strange movie.

The Korea Times has a little about the movie 26 Years Diary, a movie about Lee Su-hyun, a young Korean man who died while trying to save a drunk man who stumbled into the path of a Tokyo subway train in 2001. The article lightly criticizes the movie for being melodramatic and for presenting stereotypes, though it's still a positive review. An excerpt:

As may be expected, the film goes out of its way to cast Su-hyun in an idealized light. Athletic, popular and good with the guitar, Su-hyun is portrayed as an extremely well-adjusted young man with strong family values and a firm sense of morality; there are several scenes in which he steps in to help someone in trouble.

In addition, the movie carefully establishes Su-hyun's Korean identity with scenes of Korean-style family meals, ancestral rituals and traditional music performances. While perhaps providing a cultural context for Japanese moviegoers, these idealized moments also serve to show Su-hyun as being deeply rooted in tradition, a trait that his modernized Japanese friends sorely lack.

Indeed, there is an implied criticism of Japanese society in presenting Su-hyun in such a heroic and stereotypical fashion. Particularly in scenes that highlight Japanese prejudice towards Koreans, director Junji Hanado seems to accuse his country of losing touch with important moral and traditional values still upheld by fine Korean men such as Su-hyun.

You'll often hear older Japanese bemoaning the lack of interest in their traditional culture by younger people---or younger Japanese bitching about American values killing their culture, as C-list actress Youki Kudoh does here in TIME magazine---and people generally accept that Japanese are more reserved in public than Koreans. Yet let's not get carried away and pretend that while Koreans are more outwardly emotional, they're culturally driven by an impulse to help strangers. I mean . . . no, not in the least. If this were a Korean film my eyes would be a lot more rolly, but as it's Japanese they were probably playing up these differences for effect. But like with other movies with true, tragic stories---the 9/11 films spring instantly to mind---I don't understand why there's a need to dress it up with melodrama or by injecting storylines that weren't already there. There story is already rich enough without some hack putting his stank on it.

There's a longer, "average" review here from The Nihon Review. There's also a review and critique available here (as a .pdf file), which goes into not only symbolic role Lee took in 2001 in the run-up to the co-hosted World Cup between Korea and Japan the next year, but also as a character representative of the different cultures in two nations. The larger theme of the paper is of integrating foreigners, specifically ethnic Koreans, into a Japan that is now dealing with a declining population. Go give it a read.